


Fault

by BlueMoonHound



Series: Lucretia [18]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Suicide Ideation, Panic Attacks, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, implied eating disorder, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 19:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: Lucretia turns a broccoli floret over on her plate, staring but not really seeing. Does she deserve to be here? Not really, right? This is their evening. An evening for the crew, not for the defector who didn't even consult the group before taking away their lives.You were scared,says that little voice, but Lucretia pushes it down again. Being scared doesn't excuse her. It doesn't excuse her from any of this. She doesn't belong here, she doesn't deserve this, but she doesn't deserve to just not be present, either. She needs to hear how much they hate her. It's important.





	Fault

She told herself she could handle it. She has to, because it's her punishment to deal with her crimes. At the same time, a little part of her tells her that she shouldn't have come.

Especially since every time Taako opens his mouth, he seems to have a new way to berate her. He's worked her misdoings into conversation a dozen times now.

Lucretia turns a broccoli floret over on her plate, staring but not really seeing. Does she deserve to be here? Not really, right? This is their evening. An evening for the crew, not for the defector who didn't even consult the group before taking away their lives.

_You were scared_ , says that little voice, but Lucretia pushes it down again. Being scared doesn't excuse her. It doesn't excuse her from any of this. She doesn't belong here, she doesn't deserve this, but she doesn't deserve to just not be present, either. She needs to hear how much they hate her. It's important.

Lucretia hasn't put down her fork in ten minutes. Her hands feel too heavy, like they don't belong to her body. The inside of her skull aches, just a little, like she's forgotten how to breathe properly and can't get enough air. She's not hyperventilating or anything, though. Shallow, disconnected from herself. Her broccoli is probably getting cold, she realizes, distantly. She doesn't deserve to eat it anyway. Why does it matter?

Merle is talking about his arm – another thing she caused, her fault, – and then the conversation turns to gods. Something about Istus.

“Lucretia, do you follow a god?” Merle asks. “I mean, you didn't before, but it's been like twenty years now.”

Lucretia tries to open her mouth and finds that she can't. All she can do is stare at him, her body full of static. Is she breathing? Maybe. A little bit of air is going in and out of her nose but it doesn't seem to want to go down her throat. Merle watches her carefully, as she doesn't respond. His eyes are gray now. It's so wrong. She shouldn't have let them go into Wonderland. She should have gone with them. She should have done something. She should have just not done anything the way she did because she's terrible at making decisions and she should have known that.

“Are you okay?” Someone asks. Lup, maybe? She can't tell with sounds, now, there's so many of them, clustering around her ears and making her feel sick, trapped like an animal in a cage.

“Yes, I'm fine,” She manages, quietly, turning her attention back to her broccoli. The sound of silverware and people talking echoes and intensifies in her brain. How many people are here again? Six? It feels like twenty, in the tiny room, trapped and squashed into a tiny space in her head in her ears. Her fork taps her plate, accidentally, and the sound makes her wince. She can't do this, she can't. She needs to get away from here.

Lucretia gets up as discreetly as possible, putting her fork down on her napkin so it won't make much noise (hearing it anyway) and walks out of the room as normally as she can, then stumbles, runs down the hallway, up the stairs, finds herself walking through Merle's bedroom and onto the bedroom balcony, three floors up, staring down at the ground below her.

She realizes, distantly, that she wants to jump.

She could jump.

That would be awfully selfish.

She doesn't exactly want to die, but a two story fall would definitely hurt. The sort of hurt that would make people pity her. Maybe make her feel better for a little while. Pity is what she needs, right? She needs someone to make a noise like they care about her wellbeing. Not just asking if she's okay, because she's not and she can't say that she's not because she's too scared to because what if they tell her she's fine? What if she's been wrong about her mental state this whole time? The distance from the edge of the balcony to the ground becomes dizzying, all of a sudden, longer than she was expecting.

Lucretia sucks in a terrified breath, failing to clear her head or her vision. The buzzing in her fingers intensifies. What are you thinking? You don't deserve to breathe.

She curls up on the balcony floor and holds her breath. Breathing is reflexive, though, and she can't hold it for long. Instead, she reaches up to her neck and presses down on her heartbeat, stopping bloodflow.

It starts to rain.

Lucretia's headache is starting to make her eyesight fuzzy. She can feel every raindrop.

At some point, she lets go of her neck. She curls tighter, back pressed against the railing as if she were wishing it would vanish.

Thoughts are a bit beyond her grasp, now.

She has fingers. Lucretia moves her fingers. Electric signals from her brain. So odd. She's human. Alive. Weird.

She hears rain on an umbrella. Someone's crouching down behind her, and there's Merle, all of a sudden, leaning over her body.

“You okay? No, stupid question. Can you stand?”

“...Stand?”

“Yah, yanno, like on your legs? You're soaking wet. Nevermind. I'm gonna run a bath, you come in when you're ready. Just in my master bath, you don't gotta leave my room.”

“Okay.”

Her limbs still feel fuzzy. Like they're trying to reboot or something. Her head hurts.

It's dark out here. The sun set completely at some point.

Lucretia pushes herself to her knees. A little puddle of water had accumulated in the crook of her body. She watches it roll off the edge of the porch, dripping over the side. She's acutely aware of every raindrop that hits her, and the way that her knees press against the wood grain beneath them, through her skirt. She pulls herself up to her feet, using the railing as a grip, her skin so nonexistent that it feels like the railing is going to pass through it. It doesn't though. It's pleasantly solid under her palm, until she has to let go of it. The two steps to the door feel like falling through nothingness.

Lucretia feels bad for leaving a handprint on the glass sliding door as she goes back inside. She feels bad for dripping water on Merle's bedroom rug. The bathroom door is open, and Merle isn't inside. He must have gone back downstairs. That doesn't help with the buzzing in her head, for sure. Is any of this real? It doesn't quite feel it, like maybe she's a few feet away, puppeting her body with metal poles.

She takes off her clothes, layer by layer, and drops them on the bathroom rug. She doesn't bother closing the bathroom door. Everyone in this house has seen her naked before. She sinks into the scalding hot water, aware of its surface tension. Puts her head under. Unfortunately, she can hear all the pipes in the house with her head under the water, so she pulls it back out.

She can hear the rest of the crew eating dinner in the dining room with her head out of the water.

She closes the door to the bedroom with mage hand. It helps a little. She closes the door to the bathroom, too.

It's almost silent now. She can hear the drip of the tub faucet where it didn't entirely turn off. That's it.

She sits in the tub for a while.

She climbs out of the tub and curls up on the bathroom rug, pulling a towel over herself. Good enough.

She's so tired.

 

“Lucretia.”

She wasn't sleeping, exactly. Just drifting. She's not drifting anymore. Merle shakes her shoulder.

“Nhm?”

“Come on, I got some clothes for ya, why don't you dry off and lie down on the bed? You can sleep some more.”

Lucretia obeys mechanically. Her ability to focus has completely left her, and attention comes in snips and clips, only those fractured moments making sense. She hangs up a towel. Puts on clothes. They smell like Taako.

“Taako's clothes?”

“Lissen, luce-- I know he pretends to hatecha, but he doesn't. And you're the same size. You've both lost some weight, or I'd have gotten Lup's, yeah?”

“Hm.”

Walking out of the bathroom.

She climbs under some covers. Blissfully heavy.

 

The empty feeling must have turned into sleep at some point, because later, she wakes up. Someone's running their hand through her hair. It feels good, and she doesn't want to move.

Lucretia opens her eyes and stares at her own hand on the pillow, still weighted down by the sensation of the covers over her and her own sleepiness. She knows that heavy feeling will go away as soon as she moves.

She rolls over to see who's next to her.

It's Lup. She's reading something celestial. Lucretia doesn't have the energy to decipher the title. Celestial isn't a language she uses much.

“Morning,” Lup says.

“Hi.”

“You feeling better?”

“Hm.” She rolls again so she can press her nose into Lup's thigh. She's very real and warm and alive. It's been almost a year since Lup got her body back, but…. It feels like less time. They all went so long without Lup. “It's morning?”

“Yeahum. You slept through the night.”

“hmm.” She should go home and work on stuff again. The library is almost completely done, but there are some loose ends to tie up. And then she's got to find books to put on the shelves. And then she's got to open the damn thing. She needs to finish copying journals 80-115. After all, there's no way she's putting the originals in a public library.

“Do you want eggs?”

“Hmm?”

“You stay put and I'll get you some eggs. Over-medium?”

“Okay.”

Lup remembers how she liked her eggs during the century. Huh. She supposes she shouldn't be surprised. They were on that ship for a hundred years.

She doesn't tell Lup that she hasn't had her eggs over-medium in fourteen years.

Yesterday is fuzzy. She knows she had a breakdown, she can remember why, but the rest of the details are like pushing through a wall of distorted glass. She sat on the porch at some point. She thinks she took a bath. Something like that.

She sits up as Lup enters the room again.

Lup brings a tray table up with eggs and orange juice on it. “Here you go!” she says, putting it down in front of her. “I know you didn't eat much dinner last night so I made you three eggs.”

Lucretia's stomach growls a little. At the same time, she feels nauseous looking at her plate. Three eggs is a lot of food.

“Where are the others?” she asks, opting to sip her orange juice until she feels well enough to actually eat her eggs.

“Most of them went home,” Lup says. “Since I'm a reaper now, I don't have to worry about being late to places, so Barry went ahead without me.”

“Hm.”

She cuts a little egg and puts it in her mouth. Tastes like properly-cooked egg. She chews and swallows, already feeling a little off-color. The more she eats, though, the less worried Lup will be about her not eating. So she takes another bite. Then she puts her fork down and sips her orange juice.

“What was that all about, yesterday? I've seen you have a breakdown before, but never like that. This one's… new.”

Lucretia opts to take another bite of egg, even though it really is making her feel sick, to put off talking about this.

“Come on, Lucy. I won't bite.”

She swallows. “Guilt.”

“Guilt from what exactly?”

Lucretia doesn't reply. Wiping everyone's memories without consulting them, maybe? Taking their lives away? She has a body count, now. She's killed people. At the time, it had felt like a necessary evil, killing anyone who got too close to the relics. Now, it feels like she's done the worst kind of crime.

“Hurting them.”

“They forgive you, you know that, right? Well, Taako doesn't, but he doesn't hate you. Just doesn't forgive you. There's a difference.”

Lucretia can feel her hands shaking again. “I don't want to talk about this.”

“Okay. You don't gotta.”

Lucretia puts her fork down and pulls Lup over til she's flush against her, head resting on her shoulder.

She's so selfish.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Man I've just been so on edge all week. Hopefully writing this will help a little. 
> 
> Been thinking a lot about lucretias guilt a lot. Someone said something a while ago about how terrible stories where the victims care for the perpetrator are, and I couldn't get that out of my head this morning. Like, where do Lucretia's emotions belong, in the end? Clearly, the thb, Barry and Davenport aren't required to care about her. But she's still a traumatized individual -- there's no way she's not, don't @ me -- from just the century alone, and they're her family. I guess in the end it's about blurry lines and who qualifies as an abuser. 
> 
> My experience with situations like this one is more an experience with gaslighting than anything. Being gaslit leaves behind an enormous amount of guilt.


End file.
